MW3: After three night's of playing I’m going straight for the jugular. The MW3 multiplayer system is in desperate need of fixing. At the moment the party gaming experience (for the PS3) is awful. The lag, latency and spawning problems are far worse than in any of the previous COD games. In fact, it is so far behind Black Ops, in both fun and party enjoyment, that MW3 is shaping up to be the poorest relation in comparison to any of the previous COD franchise incarnations - with the possible exception of World of War. It’s true to say that Black Ops suffers from lag, and latency issues, but MW3 is terminally ill with it. I have never known a game to be so laggy as this one. For example, I have been instantly killed by someone scooting from round a corner, sideways on, who was shooting in the completely opposite direction but still managed to wipe me out with just two bullets. All this and I never even had the opportunity to raise my weapon and fire back. In my opinion it’s just far too biased towards the person with the faster internet connection. Without some of these major issues being addressed: the horrendous party match making delay; lag and latency etc. I can see people deserting this game in their droves back it’s uncle: the far superior Call of Duty Black Ops.

However, after saying all that though, there is only one person on this whole planet for whom this game is minutely better online experience than Black Ops. And sadly, that person is me!

I have a 15MB download and only a third of a 1MB upload. Effectively, this means that in the realm of COD ‘peer to peer servers’ I am constantly shooting at shadows. It also means that where I think I’m on the map on my TV is in reality never the same location on everyone else’s console. Basically, this renders all types of cover; buildings, walls, tyres and the dead bodies of other fellow gamers as totally useless objects to hide behind. This is simply because the chances are that I’ve already been killed milli-seconds before I even tried to take cover behind these said objects. It’s a perfectly true and honest statement to say that if I wanted to I could always get British ‘useless’ Telecom to resolve some of the issues by increasing my upload speed and sacrificing some of my download speed. But why should I? It’s only on COD that I suffer so badly with lag. I’m Activision’s customer, and as the old adage states ‘the customer is always right’, only I’m more right than the usual right, so I hope that you get that Activision. Alright!

In Black Ops, because I find the weapons so underpowered - and especially after they altered my beloved AK74U - I ended up playing a totally different online game to everyone else. I was heavily into ‘Count the hit markers’. At first it was a great game. I just had to count how many times I got ‘hit markers’ on my target and then guess how long it would take for them to turn round and wave at me; then pull down their pants down, and give me a quick treat of amble-buttock mooning, before they finally decided to put me out of my misery by shooting me dead with the customary two bullets to my big toe. As I said, at first it’s an absolute corker of a game. But, after a while, I discovered that the longer I played it the more compelled I felt to turn the Black Ops game disc into a novelty pooper-scoop for my cat.

The only difference for me between MW3 and Black Ops is that the weapons - especially the SCAR and MA16 in MW3. These two guns are slightly more powerful than any of the guns in Black Ops. Hence, I may get ‘one or two’ kills extra in a game. But ‘Hay Ho’. ‘One or two’ extra kills is exactly more than the ‘one or two’ kills I was getting in Black Ops in the first place.The long and short of it is this: Black Ops is a far better game. And, in it’s present form, MW3 is an extremely disappointing multiplayer experience. Fix it Activision, and fix it fast!